The Cloud of Knowing: Non-factive al-ta ‘know’ (as a Neg-raiser) in Korean

We distinguished the two different uses of factive and NonFactive (NF) in the verb al-ta ‘know’ in Korean and the distinction is crucially made by the different complement cases of factive –ul ACC and NF –uro Directional (oblique). The NF use is possible with nonveridical/negative contexts in English and other languages but it is possible with a positive sentence with the Directional case in Korean uniquely (Hungarian only is similar in this respect and Japanese has no NF ‘know’). The NF –uro al-ta verb, however, is different from other weaker epistemic verbs meaning ‘believe’/‘think’ in that it strongly tends to show some piece of evidence for JTB but the evidential justification may turn out to fall short of knowledge. We conducted experiments to clearly show that the NF –uro al-ta has the relation of neg-raising between the high neg S and the low (complement) neg S, which are truthconditionally equivalent. It implies that this NF verb –uro al-ta is identical in neg-raisability with other weaker epistemic verbs meaning ‘believe’ and ‘think’ in Korean. An exerpt from Sejong Corpus indicates that the NF ‘know’ in Korean typically accompies some piece of evidence that led the speaker to hold a firmer belief than other epistemic verbs meaning ‘believe’/‘think’ in Korean.